


The Monsters Are Due in Washington Square

by liz_marcs



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Apocalypse, Dark, Future Fic, Future Tense, Gen, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-03-26
Updated: 2010-04-08
Packaged: 2017-10-08 08:21:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liz_marcs/pseuds/liz_marcs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing's the same after the monsters came to town.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. For this is the stillness before the storm...

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** _Buffy_ and _Angel_ comics are willfully and cheerfully ignored. Character (original character) death. Violence.__****
> 
> **Author's Note:** Written for the fic-a-thon. Title inspired by _The Twilight Zone_ episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" written by series creator Rod Serling. Opening quote taken from _The Twilight Zone_ episode, "Third from the Sun" written by Rod Serling. Story vaguely inspired by a mash-up of both "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" and "Third from the Sun".
> 
> **Disclaimer:** Xander Harris, Faith Lehane, Willow Rosenberg, Angel, and all associated characters and organizations are the property of FOX and Mutant Enemy. Any mention of real life events and real people is not meant to imply that the people or incidents in question as they are used in the story have any relationship to reality. All original characters and the plot are mine. No payment was asked for or received in the writing of this story and no profit was earned. No copyright infringement on FOX or Mutant Enemy is intended.

**   
**

_Quitting time at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before the storm. This is the eve of the end. — _Rod Serling, from the _Twilight Zone_ episode, “Third from the Sun”

 

*********

She pretends to sleep, but really she’s watching him through slit eyes.

Not that she can see much. His face is hidden in the shadows, so much so that for all she knows he might be sleeping.

She briefly thinks about quietly getting out of bed, sneaking to the door, inching it open, and escaping into the hall. Then she’d run and run and run and run…

Two things stop her from doing it.

First, she has no idea where she’d run to. She supposes she could always run back home, but if she did that they’d follow her and find her for sure. Maybe the worst thing they’d do is drag her back to him. Or maybe this time they’ll just kill her because she’s seen and heard too much and caused them too much trouble by running away.

Secondly, she’s pretty sure that he’s not really asleep. No one sitting that straight in a chair that looks like it’s about to fall apart with a sword resting across his knees could possibly be asleep.

Her hands clench into fists under the pillow. She momentarily freezes and wonders if he heard the sound of her hands against the sheets. After everything that’s happened, she has to think that it just might be possible.

Oh, God. She doesn’t even know what to call him anymore.

She closes her eyes tight and wonders how on earth she ended up here. Actually, she knows how she got here; it’s just that none of it makes any sense.

*********

It was the voices that woke her up.

She blinked sleepily at the clock that read 1:11 and wondered why she dreamt about people having an argument.

That’s when she realized the voices were real and she wasn’t dreaming.

“…wasn’t I told?”

“Chris?” she sleepily mumbled. At least that voice sounded like her stepdad.

“Keep your voice down, dumbass,” came the softer reply.

Moira rubbed one eye with a fist as her sleepy brain tried to comprehend.

Chris said something in reply, but she couldn’t hear it.

She got out of bed with a groan. Chris and Mom rarely argued about anything, mostly because they were both so laid back. As for why they were arguing outside…

Whatever the problem, it must’ve been ginormous.

She shuffled to the window and looked out.

Chris was arguing with a woman all right, a woman who was most definitely _not_ Mom.

The stranger was standing at the foot of the stairs with her arms crossed and glaring up the front steps. Even though the dark-haired woman was short, Moira thought she looked like the type of woman who’d kick the crap out of anyone who dissed her. Heck, she looked like the kind of woman who’d kick the crap out of anyone who even _thought_ of dissing her.

“How nice of the Council to finally decide I told the truth.” That was definitely Chris’s voice and, wow, he sounded _pissed_.

A pissed-off Chris was so outside of Moira’s experience that she strained her neck to see if she could actually get a glimpse of him. He remained stubbornly out of sight. That meant he was under the overhang on the front porch.

The woman threw up her hands.

“And I should’ve been told about Buffy, Dawn, and Giles,” Chris added with a growl.

“Fuck, me. I _told_ you why you weren’t.” She looked even angrier than Chris sounded. “Wasn’t like you could do shit about it anyway.”

Chris said something back, but Moira didn’t quite catch what he said.

There was a long silence where the mysterious, dark-haired woman seemed to be reacting to whatever Chris was doing. Although the woman’s face remained partially in shadows, Moira could see her posture relax.

“I know I keep piling it on,” she finally said, “but I thought I should warn you about what’s going down. I’m really sor—”

“A little late to say you’re sorry.” Chris’s voice was harsh and low.

“Hey, don’t take this out on me. I tried to back you,” the woman angrily said. “Problem is everything I knew was stuff you told me. I didn’t eyeball anything first-hand and I sure as hell didn’t have anything resembling proof. They weren’t about to listen to me. And if you think I didn’t pay for speaking up, think again.”

“You’re not the one who’s got a grave somewhere in California,” Chris snapped.

Moira blinked. _Someone died?_ _I wonder who, _she thought.

That dark-haired woman held up her hands, almost like Chris was aiming a gun at her, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Chris disliked guns even more than Mom did, which meant that the house was a gun-free zone. Moira always thought that was odd, because Chris was a big archery nut so it wasn’t like he was philosophically opposed to weapons.

“Fine. That’s fair.” The woman dropped her hands. “But while we’re pointing fingers at each other about who fucked up the most, we’re losing sight of the important thing. You gotta think about your next step.”

“Oh, God. Katy and Moira.”

Moira felt a chill go down her spine.

This seemed to set off the dark-haired woman. “Yeah, well, you should’ve thought of that before you walked into their lives. What the hell were you thinking?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“And you know better than to say shit like that to me,” the woman retorted.

Chris mumbled something that Moira didn’t quite catch.

The woman seemed to deflate just a little bit. “Yeah, we all had to sacrifice shit over the years, haven’t we? Guess I can’t really blame you for trying to get beyond it. Guess maybe I’m a little jealous you got that for awhile.”

“For all the good it does anyone right now,” Chris said.

“We don’t know that yet,” the woman quickly said.

Moira heard Chris laugh, but it wasn’t his normal happy-laugh. There was something in it that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

“You’re probably right, but if you’re gonna be deluded you might as well go big, right?” The dark-haired woman didn’t sound any more amused than Chris’s laugh. She then pulled something out of her jacket pocket. “I gotta motor, but this is the message. You’ll get the full story then. If you’re lucky, it’ll hit the fan before it reaches here. But lucky or not, you’re gonna have to make some hard decisions.”

Moira frowned in puzzlement. What on earth was going on? It was clear to her that the dark-haired woman was delivering some kind of warning, one that involved her and Mom for sure. The problem was she couldn’t imagine Chris just standing there talking things over with someone if that were true. Chris tended to be Mr. Over-Protective sometimes, something that drove her crazy more than once.

Right now, though, she was kind of happy that was true. If Chris wasn’t running back into the house and waking up her and Mom to tell them that they were in trouble, then it probably meant that someone wasn’t going to murder them in their beds.

Chris finally stepped into view and took whatever it was the woman wanted to give him, which Moira’s now-awake brain registered as paper. Since his back was to her, she couldn’t see his expression as he unfolded it and read what it said.

“Seriously? You expect us to stay put until I meet Willow? After everything you just told me?” Holy crap, Chris was sounding pissed. _Again_.

“Keep your voice down,” the dark-haired woman ordered. “And _yes_, stay put. Running ain’t gonna do you any good. Way things are going right now it might even get _them_ killed.”

Moira swallowed hard. _Get who killed?_

Chris turned away from the woman. Moira could see he was rubbing his face, but what he said in response was so muffled that she couldn’t understand him. Even so, she breathed a sigh of relief. If Chris wasn’t making like Paul Revere, then it probably meant that she and Mom were safe as houses.

Chris, on the other hand, was obviously in trouble. The real question was, “How much?”

“Smart move.” The dark-haired woman nodded at his back.

Chris looked up at the sky, but the shadows prevented Moira from reading his expression. “Just go, already.”

Without a word, the woman backed down the walk before she turned and disappeared into the darkness.

Chris stood in front of the house with his head down for a long time after that.

*********

“Honey, I’m home!” Moira shouted as she walked through the front door.

“In here!” Chris shouted back from his and Mom’s bedroom.

Moira paused at the foot of the stairs and frowned. Chris was breaking with the usual schedule. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised after what she had witnessed, but she was hoping some alone time would give her a chance to ask him some questions.

She took a deep breath and thought. It was entirely possible that Mom was still at work. More than, actually. She’d still get that alone time and still get her chance to find out Chris’s deal.

Moira forced a smile on her face, and bounded up the stairs on into the master bedroom. “Usually you’re waiting for me with the archery equipment,” she somewhat breathlessly said. “It is Wednesday, right? Or it was last I checked. Aren’t we going to a shooting range today?”

Chris poked his head out of the cedar wood-lined closet. “Sorry, kiddo. I totally spaced.”

After what she witnessed last night, she just bet he did.

As Chris ducked back into the closet she stole up to the doorway and leaned against it. Out of sheer habit she traced the intricate knotted design Chris had carved on the inside of the door. He said he carved it in that spot where no one could see it unless they opened the door because he only wanted to share it with people he loved.

Chris could sometimes be a big ol’ sap. A weird, big ol’ sap, but still a sap.

Then again, she was kind of a sap too, so it all worked out in her favor stepdad-wise.

God, she loved this closet. Chris built it and carved the design in the door shortly after he married Mom. When she was a little kid, she’d crawl in there and hide in the dark. She’d sit there among the shoes and take deep breaths. It always smelled so good, and it always felt so safe. It was like her private fort where she could pretend to be anyone and do anything.

The best part was always when either Chris or her Mom would open the door and let in the light. Mom would always ask what she was doing in there.

But Chris…

Chris always understood why she was in the closet. Whenever he’d open the door, he’d look down at her with that grin of his and ask, “So, monkey, you defeating the bad guys yet?”

She always was and she always did, because nothing ever went wrong in the closet.

“Your mother’s putting in so many hours at work that I thought I’d surprise her and bring out the dreaded winter clothes. Try not to die of a heart attack,” Chris said as he hauled down the vacuum-packed sweaters from the top shelf. “So raincheck on our weekly archery session. We’ll do it tomorrow, ’kay?”

And just like that, Chris told her everything she needed to know about whether or not the two of them were alone. And because nothing bad ever happened in that cedar closet, Moira knew that she was never going to get a better chance to find if Chris was in trouble.

“Chris?”

Chris straightened up and swiped the moisture from underneath his fake eye. “What’s wrong, monkey?”

Moira took a deep breath. She should probably start small and work her way up. “Who was that woman you were talking to last night?”

Chris blinked at her. He opened his mouth, and then shut it again.

Moira plunged forward. “Don’t say I was dreaming, because you woke me up.”

Chris cleared his throat and turned to haul down another vacuum-packed package of winter clothes. “She was someone I used to know who showed up out of the blue.”

“In the middle of the night?” Moira asked.

Chris dropped the package to the floor. “Yeah. I got nothing for that.”

She could feel her stomach get tight as she asked, “Was she an ex-girlfriend?”

Chris snorted, but he didn’t look at her.

Moira shuffled her feet as she said, “I guess that’s a yes.”

Chris finally turned to face her. “Ummmm, it’s not…what I mean is…it was…complicated?”

“So, on-again-off-again?” Moira asked. Why she was pushing this angle instead of the are-you-in-trouble angle, she didn’t know.  Maybe it was because Chris never said much about his life before he met Mom. She knew he grew up in California and that he lost his real left eye and gained a glass left eye and a lot of scars in a car accident, but that was about it. If it weren’t for that bit of information, she’d swear that he didn’t actually have a past and instead had dropped right out of the sky and landed smack in the middle of Newport as a handyman for hire.

“Not even that.” Chris let out a puff of breath. “I used to travel a lot. So did she. We were in the same line or work, actually. Sometimes we’d cross paths. A little more than ‘occasionally,’ and a little less than ‘often’. If we happened to be in the same town…” He let the sentence trail off in a shrug.

Chris’s voice had his ‘do not want to talk about it’ tone.

Moira leaned against the doorframe and tried to picture Chris as some kind of world traveler who had a friend-with-benefits, but completely failed. He was Mr. Homebody-Plus, and always had been for as long as she could remember. “Why is she here?”

Chris gave her a sharp look, but his expression immediately softened. “She’s not begging me to take her back, if that’s what you’re worried about. She isn’t that kind of person, and we didn’t have that kind of relationship. Besides, we’re talking 12 years ago, give or take. This falls into the realm of ancient history.”

“Looked like she was giving you bad news.”

“Moira…” He ran a hand through his hair, and seemed to think better about whatever he was about to say. “If you really want to know, yeah, that’s why she was here. Three old friends of mine from back in the bad ol’ days died. They died a couple of months ago, in fact. She felt I needed to know.”

Oh. Mystery solved. That grave in California he mentioned was obviously referencing those old friends. She was relieved that it wasn’t anyone she knew. Yeah, she felt a little guilty about feeling relief, especially since the news seemed to upset Chris so much.

Then again, it seemed to her that he was upset about a lot of things last night.

“Are you in trouble?” Moira hated that her voice sounded so scratchy. “And don’t say no, because I heard you arguing with her.”

He seemed to deflate. “Honestly? I don’t know for sure, yet.”

“When are you telling Mom?” The ‘if’ wasn’t even a question in her mind.

“As soon as I know one way or the other, I’m going to have to,” Chris admitted. He looked like he didn’t want to admit it. “Moira, I hate to ask you to do this, but I need you to keep mum about this for now.”

Moira’s jaw dropped open.

He gave her a sad smile. “I know that sounds really bad, and believe me this could get a lot worse if I do anything before I get the full story. _Please_, I need some time. A couple of days, tops. As soon as I know everything, you and your Mom will know. I promise.”

Moira felt like she wanted to throw up. “I don’t like this.”

Chris reached out and pulled her into a hug. “I know. But I’ve never broken a promise to you or your Mom. I’m not going to start now.”

*********

There’s the sound of a knock and she jumps out of bed with a scream.

“Shush,” he sharply hisses at her.

Her shaky knees give out and she plops back down on the edge of the bed. She must’ve fallen asleep after all, because she feels really out of it.

He’s halfway to the door with that sword in his hand before she even realizes that he’s moved.

“Yes?” his voice sounds low and growly, kind of like a mean junkyard dog.

“It’s me.”

He pauses and orders without looking at her, “Down on the ground between the beds. Now. If I tell you to run, you run. Understand?”

She stupidly nods and does as she’s told; although why she’s bothering to listen to him after everything that’s happened she doesn’t know.

She hears him take a deep breath before he opens the door.

*********

“Mooo-ooom, you were talking for _hours_,” Moira complained as they left Cumberland Farms.

“I was talking for 5 minutes, you whiner,” Mom said as she playfully poked Moira’s shoulder.

“Mooo-ooom, stop it. You’re embarrassing me.”

Mom looked like she was trying to not roll her eyes. “C’mon, we have a couple more errands to run and then we’re home. I promise you can call all your friends and complain about what an uncool mother you have to your heart’s content.”

“I think you mean a _dorky _mother,” Moira pouted.

“Ahhh, that would be because I’m not letting you go that girl-boy party,” Mom cheerfully said as she unlocked the passenger side door.

“Are you going to change the battery in that remote, like _ever_?” Moira asked. “It’s got to be easier than unlocking the car door every time.”

This time Mom just sighed and leaned her head against the roof of the car.

“And yes, it is about you not letting me go to Joannie’s party,” Moira mumbled.

Mom stood up and began, “Honey, we talked about— Chris?”

“Hunh?” Moira asked.

“What on earth?” Mom asked under her breath as she stared down the block.

Moira followed her gaze and saw that Chris was talking to a woman with red hair in front of Tucker’s Bistro. The conversation looked pretty intense.

“Didn’t Chris tell us he was going to be in Bristol all day on a Saturday emergency for a client?” Mom asked.

 “Unh-hunh,” Moira absently agreed as she frantically searched her memory. She was pretty sure that the woman she saw talking to Chris a few nights ago was a brunette, not to mention a lot tougher-looking. This woman looked a lot softer, although it could be because she was wearing a hippy-like flowing dress.

Chris had said he was meeting someone and this _was_ a few days later. What was that name? Wendy? Wilma? Something like that.

Chris put his head in his hands.

The red-headed woman didn’t even hesitate. She immediately reached out and hugged Chris around the waist.

“Do you recognize her?” Mom asked.

 “No,” Moira admitted just as Chris returned the hug and buried his nose in the red-headed woman’s hair.

“Honey, get in the car,” Mom ordered.

“But—” Moira began.

“Don’t argue,” her mother said shortly as she ran around the front of the car and fumbled to unlock the driver’s side door.

Moira tried again. “Mom, I think that—”

Mom’s head shot up. She looked furious. “I said _now_. Don’t argue.”

Moira gave up and did what she was told.

*********

Chris still hadn’t come home by the time she went to bed at 10:30.

And he definitely hadn’t come home by the time she drifted off sometime after 11.

She knew Chris was home when she woke to the sound of her mother yelling at…

She checked the clock and groaned.

It was 3 in the morning!

Wait. Mom was yelling at Chris? She knew Mom was upset about Chris’s lie and seeing him with that red-headed woman today, but upset enough that she’d yell at him at the top of her lungs?

There was a loud crash and Moira froze.

What was going on? Either Mom threw something at Chris, or Chris threw something at Mom. That was scary to think about, especially since Mom and Chris weren’t even the type of people who had loud fights, let alone the type of people who’d throw things at one another just because they were mad.

Chris, at least she assumed it was Chris talking, said something in a low voice. Whatever he said set Mom off again in another round of yelling.

Moira chewed on a thumbnail as she tried to figure out what she should do. She supposed she could stay in her room and hide from whatever was going on downstairs. Then again if they were mad enough to throw things at each other, maybe she should go downstairs and show that they woke her up. If nothing else, it might get them to stop fighting.

She swallowed hard and forced herself out of bed, out of her bedroom, and down the stairs.

She made it all the way to the bottom, and managed to take a few steps into the living room besides, before either Mom or her Chris noticed her.

“Moira!” Mom shouted in the same tone she had used to yell at Chris.

“You woke me up,” Moira meekly said as she tried to puzzle out the scene in front of her.

There was Mom standing by the fireplace and pointing a wrought iron poker at Chris like she was about stab him with the pointy end. Chris was backed in a corner with his hands raised and hunkered like he was ready to run if Mom actually did attack him. The crash obviously came from the overturned end table and shattered lamp on the floor.

The only good thing in all of this is that it looked like the end table had been accidentally knocked over instead of thrown at someone.

“Moira?” Chris asked as he straightened up. “Are you alr—”

“You stay away from her!” Mom shouted as she ran across the room to grab Moira in a hug with her free arm. She kept the fireplace poker pointed in Chris’s general direction.

Chris put up his hands again. “I’m not—”

“You’re _not_ a lot of things, but you _are_ a whole bunch of other things, aren’t you?” Mom sounded like she was so angry that she could spit. “You _lied_ to us!”

“Please, let me explain,” Chris begged.

“So you can lie some more?” Mom furiously asked as she pulled Moira toward the dining room.

“Mom, what’s going on?” Moira asked.

“Later. _Much_ later,” Mom said through her teeth.

“Katy, there’s more I need to tell you,” Chris insisted as he carefully took a step forward.

Mom dropped the fireplace poker and reached across the front of Moira to pick-up the phone. “I have the police on speed-dial, which you know since you insisted on it. I want you out _now_! And no, you don’t get to pack some clothes. Take your coat and just go.”

Chris froze. “Look, we all need to calm down and take a few deep brea—”

“If you don’t walk out of this house right this second, I’m putting the call through.” Mom held up the phone, her thumb hovering over the speed dial button.

“Okay, okay, I’m leaving,” Chris said quietly. He kept his hands up as he edged toward his coat on the couch. “But we really need to talk, and soon. Your lives could be in danger.”

“Oh. So now you’re going to _scare _me into letting you stay. I don’t think so,” Mom angrily said.

“I’m not trying to scare anyone!” Chris protested.

“Out. Now. Don’t come back,” Mom said. “And if you try to get in contact with me or _my _daughter, you can bet my next call will be to the FBI. Wonder how much help I’ll get if I drop the name Alexander Harris.”

“Who?” Moira asked.

No one seemed to hear her.

Chris froze. “You wouldn’t.”

“Watch me,” Mom snarled.

Chris looked pale and worried as he stared at Mom.

“I’m dialing the police now,” Mom said as she pressed the speed dial button.

“You don’t have to. I’m leaving,” Chris quietly said as he snatched his coat from the couch and beat a hasty retreat.

Moira could hear the tiny sound of, “Hello? Hello?” from the phone as the front door slammed.

Mom put the phone to her ear. “Sorry. I pressed the wrong speed dial number,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Then she hung up.

“Mom, what happened?” Moira asked.

Mom put the phone in its cradle, but didn’t answer.

“Why did you throw Chris out?” Moira insisted.

Mom let out a shuddering breath as she spun around and grabbed Moira in a tight hug.

“Mom?” Moira gasped.

Then Mom began to cry.

*********

“You can get back into bed. False alarm,” he says.

She thinks about staying where she is just to spite him, but the carpet is disgusting and she’s pretty sure there are things living under beds. Mice, cockroaches, and rats would be the nicer choices.

She reluctantly gets up, but instead of getting back under the covers she sits on the edge of her bed.

Crap. That dark-haired woman’s here and she looks just as mean as when she first saw her.

“You both look like holy hell,” the woman remarks as she drops a large Army surplus-sized duffle to the floor with one hand and holds up a large paper bag with the other. “I brought food. I went with a place that wasn’t serving ptomaine on a plate.”

He backs off from the woman. “Close the door.”

As the woman does as she’s told, she says, “You reek. Worse, you look like you reek.”

Actually, he looks like he was at the bad end of a beating. There’s a vivid red cut across his right cheek and a bruise is blossoming very nicely on the left cheek. His hands and his clothes are still covered blood. The knowledge that the blood belongs to someone else makes her want to scream and throw-up, pretty much in that order, just like the first time she saw him looking like this.

Just like the first time she saw him for what he was, but before she understood what it meant, she doesn’t scream or throw up. She clenches her jaw and glares at both of them.

The woman notices the death glare, despite the dim light in the room. “If looks could kill.”

He spins away from the woman to return to his chair. “Can’t blame her.”

“Nope. The way you look ain’t helping,” the woman says.

She wants to remind them both that “she” has a name and that “she” is in the room with them, but she doesn’t want to talk to either one of them. She concentrates on glaring at them instead.

“It’s been more than a day since we got the hell out of Dodge,” the woman says, “so I’m thinking shower time for you.”

“And who’s going to watch—”

“—for trouble? That would be me.” The woman holds out a hand. “Gimme the sword and take a shower. You show up at JFK looking like that, TSA will be all over your ass.”

She hates herself for curling forward. As much as she hates him right now, she has a feeling that the woman would probably kill her without even thinking about it if she breathed wrong.

He looks like he’s thinking about whether or not leaving her alone with that woman is a good idea.

She’s disappointed but not really surprised when he finally hands the woman the sword and again gets up from the chair.

*********

Sunday morning breakfast had a ritual. Chris hunkered over the local news sections, Mom wielding the scissors over the coupons and bogarting the main section of the paper, and Moira reading the Sunday funnies and the entertainment section, in that order. Conversation mostly centered on what kind of family thing they’d be doing that day.

Without Chris, the ritual pretty much went out the window.

The Sunday paper was nowhere to be seen. Moira figured it was probably still out on the front stoop.

Instead of eggs, bacon, and toast, it was cold cereal and orange juice for her and a cup of coffee for Mom.

Instead of talking about going to the movies, or Roger Williams Park, or Narragansett Beach, or McCoy Stadium to catch the Pawtucket Red Sox, or the Providence Civic Center to watch the Providence Bruins, or maybe even heading up to Boston to hit the Science Museum or New England Aquarium, Mom just silently stared at her coffee.

Moira wanted to ask what had happened, but she was kind of afraid of the answer. If Mom had thrown Chris out because she thought he was cheating on her with that red-haired woman, Moira would have to find a way to convince her that she was wrong. The problem was that she’d have to admit to knowing something secret about Chris. After last night and seeing how Mom seemed ready to kill Chris with the fireplace poker, Moira was afraid to admit to anything. What if Mom started yelling and screaming at her the way she did Chris?

Moira knew on some level that it was a pretty stupid thing to worry about. After all, she confronted Chris — minus the yelling and the brandishing of pointy things — after she witnessed his argument with that dark-haired woman. Chris even answered her questions, sort of. And it was _Chris_ that told her to keep his secret while promising that he would tell Mom once he knew what was going on. It wasn’t her fault if she believed him and went along with what he wanted.

Besides, maybe Mom threw Chris out not because she thought he was cheating on her with the redhead in the hippie clothes. Maybe Mom threw Chris out because he kept his promise and told Mom everything.

Moira wavered back and forth between saying something and keeping her mouth shut.

Luckily, Mom decided to talk first.

“You’re probably wondering what happened.” Mom sounded like she’d been crying all night. No surprise since Mom looked really awful, like sick-awful instead of crying-awful.

Moira nodded and waited.

“Chris…” Mom’s voice trailed off and she cleared her throat. “Chris has been lying to us. About everything.”

“Lying?” Moira asked. “Like, about what?”

“About everything,” Mom repeated again as she tapped the table with her fingertips.

That wasn’t the most helpful answer.

Moira dug into her cereal as she continued her silent debate about whether or not she should tell Mom everything she knew about Chris and his secrets.

“Honey, have you ever noticed anything odd about Chris?” Mom suddenly asked.

Moira just barely stopped herself from saying, _Mom, Chris’s picture is in the dictionary next the definition of odd._ She was pretty sure making a joke about Chris’s sometimes weird quirks wasn’t the way to go right now.

Instead, she asked, “Odd? In what way?”

Mom put her head in her hands. “I don’t know. Just…odd. Maybe…maybe…seeing him pace the front porch while he mutters to himself? Or throwing salt around the backyard as a joke? Or splashing bottled water on a windowsill and acting like it’s an accident? Anything like that?”

“You make him sound like he’s crazier than the usual,” Moita joked. She immediately sucked in her lips. _Stupid, stupid, **stupid**_, shethought.

Instead of jumping on her for making a bad joke like Moira expected, Mom just pinched her nose. “You’re right. You’re right. I’ve got to be imagining things. But the things he _said…_”

“What did he say?” Moira tremulously asked.

Mom blinked at her, like she had forgotten Moira was there. “I’m going about this the wrong way,” she finally said.

“Ummmm….”

“Has Chris ever asked you to keep any secrets?” Mom asked.

Moira’s voice was caught in her throat.

“He has, hasn’t he?” Mom was obviously with-it enough to catch her delay in answering the question.

_Busted_, Moira thought. She was going to have to tell everything she knew. It was kind of a relief to have the decision taken out of her hands.

“I, ummm, see, he woke me up a few nights ago around 1 in the morning and…”

Mom stiffened. “What did he do to you?”

The question had come right out of the blue. “Do to me?” Moira asked.

“You said he woke you up. In the middle of the night, no less.” Mom’s hands clutched her coffee cup like she was getting ready to throw it.

Now Moira was really confused. “Hunh? What?”

Mom took a deep breath before saying, “Honey, I want you to know that I won’t be mad at you. I mean, I’m not mad. At you. But you really need to tell me. After he woke you up, what did he do or say to you?”

That’s when the light finally dawned. “Mom! You think Chris was perving on me? Seriously? I’ve known him since I was, like, 3 years-old.”

Mom let out her breath in a woosh and almost smiled.

“_Besides_, they tell us all about bad touch-good touch at school. _Every year_.” Moira knew she sounded angry. Well, yeah, she really was angry that Mom that would think that Chris could do something like that to her. “Not to mention you and Chris going over the whole bad touch-good touch thing. Don’t you’d think I’d tell _you _if Chris or anyone else tried to mess with me? Or, well, at least _someone _if that happened?”

“Okay, okay!” This time Mom actually did smile. “Message received. I wasn’t implying anything. I swear. I was only making sure that I wasn’t blind and flailing on the motherhood front on top of everything else. ”

Moira huffed a breath. “This is _Chris_ we’re talking about.”

“I know, I know.” Mom shook her head and her smile disappeared. “Two days ago, the idea would’ve never even crossed my mind, but after last night I don’t know what to believe about him anymore.”

Moira was still so twisted around by the turn the conversation had taken, that she blurted, “What happened last night to get you all weirded out about him?”

Mom tapped the tabletop again and didn’t look Moira in the eyes. “Some things about his past, none of which makes any kind of sense. None of which can possibly be real.”

“Except for that Alexander thing you threatened him with,” Moira added.

Mom’s head snapped up. “What? How do you know about that?”

“You threatened to call the FBI and tell them about some guy named Alexander-something. Remember?” Moira asked.

“Were you there at that point?” Mom rubbed her face. “Oh. Wait. You weren’t there when he told me about…about…never mind. You were there after. Sorry, honey, I’m still trying to sort through everything. Reality is still a little soft and fuzzy around the edges.”

“Are you going to tell me?” Moira asked.

“Not right now. I have to figure out what’s real and what’s not first. As soon as I figure it out, I promise to tell you everything,” Mom said.

First Chris needing to figure stuff out before he told anyone what was going on with him, now Mom.  It seemed to Moira that the adults were so busy trying to figure stuff out for themselves that they forgot to actually talk to anyone. Or, at least, talk to _her._

“And you can start helping me figure out what’s really going on by telling me why Chris woke you up at 1 in the morning,” Mom said.

Moira cringed. “Oh. Yeah. Right. That.”

Mom took a deep breath, and said, “I’m waiting.”

There was no help for it. She’d have to tell everything she knew. She began with being woken up by the sound of voices in front of the house; seeing the dark-haired woman who didn’t look anything like the redhead they saw talking to Chris a few days later; her confronting Chris; the bits she was able to glean about Chris’s secret past based on what he told her; and the fact he swore her to secrecy until he figured out whether or not he was in any trouble.

Moira felt like it took hours for her to spill everything she knew. Through it all Mom’s eyes got bigger and bigger and her jaw slacker and slacker. She interrupted a few times to ask questions, but not nearly as often Moira expected she would.

When it was over, Mom rubbed her forehead like she had a headache.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Moira asked in a timid voice.

Mom let out a breath through her pursed lips. “Honestly? A little bit. You should have come to me right away.”

“But Chris promised he’d tell you everything,” Moira weakly protested. “I believed him.”

“And you’d have no reason not to believe him,” Mom quietly said. “I suppose I can’t blame you. If the same thing happened with my dad, I’d probably do the same thing.”

Moira barely remembered grandpa, since he died when she was 6. The only thing she could remember was that he lived in a nursing home and was sick all the time. Still, he must’ve been young and somewhat Chris-like once upon a time. “You would?”

“Yeah, I probably would.” Mom then gave her a Serious Look. “I want you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“I want you to stay away from Chris.” Mom was now using her I’m-dead-serious voice. “Don’t try to find him, don’t try to contact him. If he approaches you at school or on the street, _immediately_ find a responsible adult and tell them to call me. If you can’t find anyone, you call the police and stay on the line with them. Got it?”

“Why?” Moira asked. “You don’t seriously think Chris would do something to us, do you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Or maybe I hope he won’t. I just don’t know anymore,” Mom answered.

*********

Newport wasn’t exactly a small town. On top of that, it was also a mini-tourist Mecca between the old mansions, the Cliff Walk, beaches, Fort Adams State Park, theaters, and the Newport Yacht Club.

However, it was small enough.

Moira knew when she walked into Thompson Middle on Monday that no one would know that Chris had been booted out of the house. That pretty much changed by Tuesday morning. By the end of the day Tuesday it seemed like it was common knowledge, despite the fact that she hadn’t breathed a word about what happened.

Right on schedule, really. She was kind of hoping she’d have longer than Tuesday, but she really wasn’t expecting it.

Things got really weird by Wednesday. That’s when wild rumors started getting back to her.

She heard that Chris was seen handing money to some brunette woman in front of the Motel 6 before the two of them walked into one of the rooms. She also heard that Chris was seen entering a different motel room with a redhead at the Best Western.

Moira wondered if it was the same dark-haired tough chick she had seen arguing with Chris and the same redhead she’d seen Chris talking to in front of Tucker’s Bistro.

The weirdest rumor of all, though, was the one where Chris was cruised by a tall, dark-haired _man _in the Marriott hotel bar. After a brief talk, Chris supposedly followed the man up to his room.

Moira couldn’t picture Chris in a bar. He avoided bars like the plague. Sure, she’d seen him with a beer in his hand, and sometimes a glass of wine, but only occasionally and only on special occasions. Then there was the whole getting cruised deal. As far as she knew, Chris wasn’t even bi, let alone gay.

That wasn’t even taking into account that Chris couldn’t possibly be at all three hotels at the same time. The Marriott was down by Long Warf, which was nowhere near the Best Western or Motel 6.

She suspected the rumors were probably someone in a rival clique who was trying to start trouble and make her feel more like crap than she already did. Her bet: Missy Ellington and her little toady Barbara Quinn.

The repeated rumors about Chris jumping into bed with anything that moved now that he was out of the house got to Moira so badly that she knew she had to get away. She pleaded stomach cramps in the middle of her last class of the day. Instead of going to the nurse’s office, she bailed completely and snuck out a side door.

As soon as she hit the outside air, she took off at a run as she angrily swiped tears from her eyes.

She hit the sidewalk in front of the school, and ran for a bus stop. Hopefully, she’d catch a city bus before school let out. The last thing she needed was for a school bus to drive by and have everyone see her waiting for the RIPTA, because then everyone would know that she’d heard the rumors and that they bothered her. School would quickly become all drama all the time if that happened.

“Hey, monkey.”

Moira skidded to a halt and looked up. Chris was leaning against the trunk of a car she didn’t recognize with his arms folded. He looked like he hadn’t shaved, showered, or slept for days. As for the state of his clothes, it looked like he’d slept in them despite the fact they appeared clean.

If it was possible, he looked even worse than Mom did.

She had been distracted. She didn’t even see Chris until she was almost on top of him. When she later told Mom about what happened that was the excuse she used.

Of course, she had no excuse for what happened next.

“H-h-h-hey,” she stuttered.

Chris unfolded his arms and stood straight. “Can we talk?”

Moira looked behind her to see if anyone was watching before looking back at him. “Mom says I have to stay away from you.”

He seemed defeated as he nodded. “She tell you why?”

“Not exactly.” Moira took a step forward. “Chris, what’s going on?”

“Feel like a Del’s?” Chris suddenly asked.

“Are you going to answer my questions?” Moira asked.

“Yes,” Chris promised. He winced. “Well, mostly yes.”

Moira decided. “Mom might see us if you take me to Del’s.”

“Not if I take you to the one in Middleton.”

“Mom can’t see you driving me home,” Moira said.

“I’ll drop you off around the block.” Chris shuffled his feet. “Okay?”

Moira could practically feel the weight of her cell phone in her backpack. She knew what Mom wanted her to do, but she needed to do this for herself.

“Okay,” Moira agreed.


	2. This is the eve of the end...

The dark-haired woman carries both sword and food to the other bed and sits down on its edge. “You gotta name, kid?” the woman asks as she sets the sword next to her on the mattress.

She refuses to answer.

“Shit. That was a stupid question wasn’t it? I already know, don’t I? I suck at small talk. Hazards of the job.” The woman opens the bag and digs through it, removing something that looks like a paper-wrapped sub. “Name’s Faith, if you’re wondering,” the woman adds.

She doesn’t even want to look at the woman — at Faith. Faith’s nothing more than a lie. Or is it that everything that came after Faith is a lie? She doesn’t know. What’s more, she doesn’t care. All she knows is that yesterday she had one life where she knew everyone, and today she’s got a new life where she doesn’t know anyone.

Faith’s watching her now. She holds one of those wrapped subs in one hand as she sets aside the bag. “I’d ask how you’re doing, except I know that the question would make me sound like a dumbass,” Faith says. “You ain’t okay.”

“What do you know about it?” she asks. She immediately clamps her mouth shut. She didn’t want to say anything. She doesn’t even want to talk to _him_, let alone to this…this…scraggly ’ho.

“More than anyone ever should.” Faith sounds almost sad about it. Faith suddenly thrusts the sub at her. “You haven’t eaten since we left Newport.”

“Not hungry,” she mutters.

“There’s a shock,” Faith impatiently shakes the sub at her, “but we got a long few days ahead of us and you passing out from hunger or low blood sugar or whatever could attract the wrong kind of attention, and I ain’t talking about bad attention of the human kind.”

A memory of a twisted, hate-filled, inhuman face pressed against the bedroom window flashes across her mind, and next thing she knows she’s reaching for the sub.

“That’s a good girl,” Faith absently says as she once more digs through the bag. “I don’t know why I’m bothering to hunt and peck through the food. I got the same for everyone.”

What Faith brought was Italians for everyone. She’s not a big fan of antipasto on torpedo bread — something _he_ used to say when he was someone else — but she doesn’t want to talk to anyone any more than she has to.

She takes a bite instead. Then she takes another.

“Whoa, whoa! Not so fast!” Faith barks.

The bathroom door flings open on Faith’s shout.

*********

The view wasn’t nearly as pretty as it would’ve been if they’d just gone to the Del’s down near the waterfront.  Instead, she had a clear view of the back of a Jiffy Lube and a tire place from her perch on the trunk of Chris’s car.

“Who’s car is this?” she asked, as she sucked her lemonade slush through a straw.

“A friend’s. And by ‘friend’, I mean, someone I really don’t like but don’t quite hate,” Chris answered. He had the cover off his cup and was stabbing at the lemonade slush with his straw.

The sight of Chris acting so _Chris_ made her smile. She was pretty sure it was the first smile she’d had since Saturday.

“Is this person you don’t quite hate a woman with dark hair or a woman with red hair?” Moira asked.

Chris snorted. “I actually _like_ them, even if the first one tends to drive me nuts.”

Moira swallowed hard. “It wouldn’t be tall, dark, and handsome, would it?”

Chris paused in his stabbing. “Hunh?”

“A guy?” Moira asked.

Chris pinched the bridge of his nose. “_Please_ tell me you haven’t seen him making like Lurker McLurk around the neighborhood at night. While I totally appreciate the thought, he’s more likely to attract the bad kind of attention instead of—”

“Umm, no. I haven’t actually seen him,” Moira squeaked her interruption.  “More like there’s been these rumors about you…and a guy…in a hotel bar…and…ummm…”

Chris sighed and began stabbing his lemonade mush again. “Gotta hand it to Willow, she’s still got it. Not only did people see it, everyone’s talking about it. Even people who don’t even know me are talking about it, apparently. If I survive this mess, I’m going have to strangle her with my bare hands because there’s no way I’ll ever be able to live Angel-gate down.”

“Angel-gate?”

“The –gate to end all –gates,” Chris grumbled.

Aaaaand she definitely recognized Chris’s don’t-wanna-talk-about-it voice. To compensate, Moira attacked from another angle. “So you aren’t into guys?”

Chris’s stabbing motion became more violent. “I guarantee that if I’m ever tempted, he’d be the absolute _last _guyin this or any other dimension that I’d want to give a big ol’ happy.” He stopped. “Unless it involved preventing the extinction of the human race.” He shook his head. “Nah. Not even then. I like my neck just the way it is, thanks.”

Moira giggled.

“And yes, this is his car. Or at least he paid for it.” Chris kicked a tire. “Whatever he paid, he was robbed.”

Moira took another sip to strengthen her nerves. “So what’s going on? Really?”

Chris doubled his concentration on the lemonade slush in his cup. “I did promise, didn’t I?”

Moira nodded and took another sip.

Chris gave her his Serious Face. “Do you think you can convince your mom to leave town for a mini-vacation? Preferably across the Canadian border? Or barring that, New York? Maybe Boston? Hell, I’ll even settle for Providence.”

“Why?” Moira screwed up her face. “Not that you telling me why is even going to get me anywhere near how I’m supposed to do that. It’s in the middle of the school week, not to mention that it’s October. There’s no way she’d agree to a vacation this close to the start of school.”

“You’re right. Can’t blame me for taking the shot.” Chris swiped away at the moisture gathering under his fake left eye. “As for why…” His voice trailed off as he gave Moira a worried look.

“Are you in trouble?” Moira asked.

“Yes,” Chris immediately admitted. “The problem is the entire city of Newport is right there with me.”

Moira could feel her heart pounding. “What kind of trouble?”

Chris closed his eyes and shook his head. “You’re going to think I’m crazy when I tell you what I’m about to tell you. Just hear me out. Don’t interrupt, just listen, okay?”

“Okay,” Moira agreed.

“Very soon, I don’t know exactly when, it could be days or it could be weeks, the sky is going to become pitch black.” Chris looked down into his cup as he stirred his lemonade slush with the straw. “In fact, it’s going to get so dark that if you’re outside it’s going to seem like someone threw a blanket over your head in a dark room.”

_Is there a storm coming?_ Moira wanted to ask. She didn’t, though. She promised she wouldn’t interrupt.

“When you see the sky turning dark, I want you to get home as fast as you can. If you don’t think you’ll be able to make it home before the sky goes full black, run into the most secure building you can find. Either way, whatever you do, don’t go outside no matter what happens.” Chris looked up at her. “Understand?”

Moira nodded.

“Now, this is the part that’s going to sound like I’ve really gone crazy flakes.” Chris made a face as he set his cup on top of the trunk. “If you manage to get home, I want you to lock the door, pull all the shades, and close all the curtains. You’ll find some white candles in my desk drawer. Use those for any light you need and _only_ those candles. And whatever you do, _don’t look out any of the windows._ There’s no way I can stress enough. _Don’t look out the windows._ If you look out the windows, they’ll see you. If they see you, they can get to you.”

Moira shivered, and not because the lemonade slush was making her feel cold. “They?”

Chris looked down into her face. “Monsters. Demons. Things that lurk. Things that kill. They’re real, and they’re coming. If they win here, it’s not going to end with Newport. It’s not going to end with Rhode Island. It’s not going to end with this country. They’re going to keep going until all that’s left is them and the dark.”

Moira wanted to laugh at him. She wanted to tell him that monsters and demons weren’t real. She wanted to tell him to stop lying and to just tell her the truth.

She didn’t.

The intense way Chris said it, the way he looked at her like he was speaking the God’s honest truth, stopped her cold.

“Aside from not looking out the windows, don’t open the door either. I don’t care if you hear someone you know out there. I don’t care if it’s your friends, me, or your mother. Don’t open the door. Don’t go near the door.” Chris fixed her with a look. “Understand?”

Moira gave him a hesitant nod.

“You’ll know it’s safe when you see sunlight.” Chris winced. “No. I promised the truth. The truth is there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever see sunlight again. So it’s more like, ‘if you see sunlight you can throw open the doors and windows’. But not a moment before, okay?”

She had no idea what to say to that. None. Chris had never seemed crazy-paranoid before, and she never knew him to believe in demons or monsters. Yet, here she was in broad daylight in a Del’s parking lot listening to Chris talk about demons and monsters like they were not only real, but a real danger.

For lack of anything better to say, Moira said, “Okay.”

Chris’s shoulders slumped, like he knew that she was just humoring him. “If you manage to get home in time, and if they manage to get into the house, get into the closet.”

“Which one?” Moira asked.

“Your mother’s cedar closet. They won’t be able to get in there. It’s because of the design I carved inside the door. Only humans can open that door once it’s closed.” Chris suddenly swatted his cup onto the parking lot pavement. “It’s almost like I knew this day was coming no matter what I did.”

Oh, God. The design! Chris had been crazy-paranoid all along? How did she miss that? How did Mom miss that?

Moira carefully slid off the trunk. “It’s getting late. Mom’s going to wonder where I am.”

Chris dropped his head. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get you home.”

Moira began to move toward the passenger side door. Chris may be paranoid-crazy, but she knew that he wouldn’t hurt her. Still, if he really believed that demons and monsters were coming to get them all, why was he telling her and not Mom?

As she waited for Chris to dig his keys out of his pocket, she figured she might as well ask the million dollar question. “Chris? Have you told Mom any of this?”

Chris didn’t look at her as he freed his car keys and pressed the remote to unlock the doors. “I tried, but she wasn’t in a listening mood.”

*********

Chris pulled up to the curb just as the car’s clock hit 4:40 p.m.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I guess,” Moira said.

“Okay.” As Moira reached to unlock the door, Chris added, “No matter what happens, just remember I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Moira said. She’d have to tell Mom about this. She’d have to. Something happened to Chris that drove him over the edge, but he needed professional help, not a jail cell.

Except if she told Mom that Chris met her after school, he probably would end up in a jail cell. She needed to know more before she decided whether or not to tell Mom about this.

“Hey, Chris?” Moira asked.

His head snapped up. “What?” He sounded hopeful.

“Who’s Alexander?” Moira asked. Mom used that name when she threatened Chris with the FBI. Maybe if she knew who Alexander was and why he’d get Chris in trouble, it could help her reach a decision.

Chris seemed genuinely confused. “Alexander? Who?”

“Mom said that if she saw you again, she’d call the FBI and tell them about some guy named Alexander,” Moira said. “Who is he?”

“Oh. That.” Chris put his hands on the steering wheel, like he was contemplating taking off while Moira was still in the car. “Alexander. Xander, actually. He was someone I knew. Once.”

“What happened?” Moira pressed.

Chris looked at her with a nervous smile. “He was a little crazy. Scratch that. A lot crazy. He had something to prove when he left his hometown, I guess.”

“So you worked with him?” Moira asked.

“One way to put it.” Chris tapped the steering wheel. “He wasn’t ever the smartest guy in the room, or the strongest, or the best fighter. Hell, he didn’t even always know what he was doing. One thing he was good at? Not getting killed. He was better at that than most people. Plus, like I said, crazy with a side of something to prove. Xander in a nutshell.”

“So why can he get you in trouble?” Moira asked.

“We all worked for this organization called the Council.” Chris ran a hand through his hair. He seemed nervous. “Now, this Council worked with other organizations, some good, some pretty sketch. He got this idea in his head that one of these organizations, one that was in the ‘good’ column, was actually an evil-playing-good-because-they’re-biding-their-time kind of group. He looked into it and saw a few things that seemed to support that theory. He got really OCD about the whole thing. He kept trying to dig up more information; even with all the dead ends he kept hitting and even after his friends told him to back off. Some thought he was going up the wrong tree with his bark. Some believed him but told him he needed to be a little bit more patient, otherwise he was going to wind up with his neck in a noose before he got anywhere near his precious proof. Anyway, after digging around for more than 2 years, he finally catches a break. A meeting where he’ll get all the proof he needs that this group is actually a bunch of black hats. If he gets his hands on that proof, he’ll be able to stop these guys in their tracks.”

Chris paused a moment. He was breathing heard, and his hands kept clutching and loosening around the steering wheel. It was pretty obvious that this story was going to end very badly.

“It’s okay. You can tell me what happened,” Moira said. “I promise I won’t tell Mom anything. I won’t even tell her that we talked.”

Chris froze. Then he slowly swiveled his head around so he was looking at Moira.

“I promise, I won’t tell her anything,” Moira swore again. “Your secret’s totally safe with me.”

When Chris began talking again, his voice was much steadier. “A lot of things went wrong, and a dozen people got killed just on our side alone. No idea how many people on the other side. Worse, it was all for nothing. There was no proof there, or maybe it got destroyed in the fight or spirited away by one of the bad guys during the fight. I dunno. All I know is that the Council went ballistic. From their point of view, Xander had randomly attacked allied white hats because he didn’t trust them. The Council wanted his head. The bad guys wanted his head. It was a pretty awful scene.”

“So to get out of it, he framed you and you got blamed,” Moira said.

Chris shook his head. “No. The Council just wanted him fired and tossed out on the street with no way to protect himself. The head of the Council, a guy named Giles, thought that was a really bad idea. One, Xander knew too much, which would make him a target for random baddies that wanted inside information about the Council. And two, Xander managed to make a lot of enemies over the years and if those enemies found out they’d come looking for revenge. He knew if Xander was tossed out on the street with no one to fall back on, he’d be dead within weeks.”

“So, this Giles blamed you for Xander’s mess so he could keep Xander?” Moira asked.

“Wrong again. See, Giles was among those people telling Xander he was going after perfectly innocent people and that he should just drop it. After the attack, Giles was furious with him. There was no way he wanted to keep Xander on the payroll.” Chris took a deep breath and added, “So he arranged for Xander to have an ‘accident’.”

Moira could hear the quotes around the word ‘accident’, even though Chris didn’t do the air quote thing with his fingers.

“Let’s just say that Xander went snorkeling alone off the coast of Baja California alive and well. Three weeks later, a corpse washed up on the beach with his teeth smashed out and his hands missing,” Chris said. “Luckily, his worried friends had descended on the town where he’d been staying and were conveniently on-hand to swear that the dead guy was their best bud. I heard they cremated him and buried the ashes in some cemetery outside LA.”

Moira felt her blood run cold. “He was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“In a way.” Chris looked at her, like he was trying to bore a hole through her forehead with eyesight alone. “After Xander disappeared, I walked away from the Council with a clear conscience. I did what Giles asked me to do, and I swore that it would be the last thing I’d ever do for him.” Chris laughed, but it sounded bitter. “Now Giles is dead. I guess I can keep a promise after all.”

_Oh God, oh God, oh God._ She didn’t need Chris to spell it out for her. He killed Xander. That’s why Mom wanted her to stay far, far away from him.

All of a sudden, she wasn’t sure about anything. If Chris could kill someone he knew in cold blood…

Moira didn’t want to think about what that meant. She had to get away.

She dove for the door handle while Chris impassively watched her.

As she flung the door open, he reached out and grabbed her by her arm. She let out a small scream.

“Make sure you remember everything I said,” Chris told her. “And make sure to tell your mother _everything_ I said to you. Make double-sure you tell her about the closet. Tell her it’s like a homemade panic room if the worst happens. You’ll tell her, right?”

Moira had never been so frightened in her life. “I…I…I will. I’ll tell her. Everything.”

“See that you do,” he said.

Then he let her go.

Moira dove from the car and slammed the door shut behind her.

As she ran down the block for home, she could hear Chris scrub out as he sped away from the curb.

*********

“What is it? What happened?” he shouts.

In the time it takes to blink, Faith leaps from sitting on the bed to catching him as he stumbles through the bathroom door. He’s only partially dressed. The pants are still on — thank God for small favors — but that’s about all.

For the first time, she sees the full extent of the damage. There are so many bruises all over his chest, arms, and what little she can see of his back that she wonders how it’s even remotely possible that he’s conscious, let alone move as fast as he does.

She once again wonders if he’s even human.

“Nothing’s wrong. The kid here was wolfing down her sub, and I was afraid she’d end dinner with a Technicolor yawn,” Faith says as she somehow manages to haul him back to his feet, despite the fact that he’s so much bigger than she is.

She opens her mouth to protest as she looks down at the sub in her hands so she can prove her point.

Oh. More than half the sub is gone. She remembers taking only a couple of bites, so she has no idea how she managed to eat that much with so little chewing.

When she looks up again, he’s stupidly blinking down at Faith like he’s suddenly forgotten who Faith is, who he is, who she is, and how the three of them ended up in crappy motel room that looks like it doubles as a crack den when people not them are renting it.

Faith glances around him into the closet-sized bathroom. “You got a change of clothes in there, sport?”

Instead of answering, he swivels his glassy glaze gaze away from Faith and on to her. “You okay?” he asks.

She still doesn’t want to talk to him. She looks down at her sub instead.

She doesn’t want to see how badly he’s been hurt. She doesn’t want to feel sorry for him. He said this was his fault back when this whole thing started. He _said_ it, and there is no way he can ever take it back.

She won’t let him take it back.

She may not believe anything he says ever again, but she does believe him on that point.

“Yo!” Faith snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Earth to Xander! Snap to. Clothes? Clean ones? You got ’em in the bathroom?”

She winces upon hearing that hateful name, the one that belongs to a complete stranger.

He shakes his head like he’s been slapped. “Unh, no.”

Faith steps back and crosses her arms. “So, you were going to clean up and then…what? Put on the blood-soaked rags you wore in there?”

He rubs his face with his hands. “I don’t have spares. _We_ don’t have spares.”

“Wrong. You do.” Faith spins on her heel and marches over to the Army surplus-sized duffle bag. “I brought a couple of changes for both of you, most of which will enhance your temp idents until we get the pair of you safe in the loving arms of our Watcher overlords. Had to guess the sizes, so they might not fit perfect.”

Faith pulls out two sets of sweat pants with hoodies. She shudders when she sees the smaller set is a sticky sweet pink. She hates pink. 

Faith tosses the grey sweat set at him as she adds, “When was the last time you slept?”

“Well? Or at all?” he asks. He fumbles the catch, and is forced to bend down to pick up the clothes.

“At all,” Faith answers.

“Two days. Maybe three,” he admits as he straightens back up with a grimace.

She viciously hopes it’s a grimace of pain.

“That explains that, then.” Faith chews her lip. “You sure as shit can’t fly to London acting like an escapee from an R.E.M. sleep deprivation experiment. Shower. I’ll work something out so you can catch a few zees.”

He again looks away from Faith and turns his gaze on her. He opens his mouth to say something.

She pointedly looks away from both of them and stares at a suspicious brown stain on the wall above her bed.

She has nothing to say to him.

Nothing at all.

*********

The drama that ensued after Moira told Mom about her unauthorized chat with Chris made her feel like she almost would’ve been better off if she kept her mouth shut.

The important word here being ‘almost’.

The only good thing about the whole mess and the aftermath was that at least Moira now knew why Mom was being so Mama Bear about Chris, and she didn’t blame her one bit.

What really bugged Moira while Mom let her know that she had done something “foolish” and asked her whether she knew “just how wrong this could have gone” was that if Mom had been honest right up front and told her that Chris was not just a dangerous, paranoid nut, but was also a murderer, she would’ve run right back to Thompson Middle the second she saw Chris without saying a word.  However, pointing out that Mom’s total lack of honesty played a very big role in what happened was probably a first-class ticket to being grounded.

As it was Moira had to beg and plead when Mom started making noise about keeping her home from school until Chris was locked up for good. If she did that while rumors were still circulating that Chris had become a male ’ho, she’d never live it down. The whole story wouldn’t just follow her around for the rest of the year, but for the rest of middle school, and all of high school. Everyone would take it to mean that the rumors were true and she was bothered by it, which meant she’d be stuck hearing the reheated gossip about Chris for the rest of her life.

It took some doing, but Moira managed to turn Mom around on the stay-home-from-school idea. However, that meant Mom would be driving her to and picking her up from school. She couldn’t go over to her friends’ houses after school, although they could come here. After school activities were out for the time being. She couldn’t go anywhere without Mom playing chaperone, not even in the front yard.

The deal sucked, but Moira knew that it was the best she was going to get until Chris disappeared from their lives down a deep, dark hole of the federal prison kind.

As for school, by and large it didn’t get any worse. The rumors about Chris were still circulating, but not with as much enthusiasm as the day before. It was almost like her schoolmates were working on autopilot, and that it wouldn’t take much for the gossip mavens to move on as soon as something shinier came along. While Moira wasn’t quite ready to breathe a sigh of relief, she figured that by this time next week a new piece of gossip would be making the rounds and making someone else’s life perfectly miserable.

Despite the sense that things on the school front were beginning to move back to her level of normal, she still approached her usual lunch table with her usual gang with some trepidation. Surely her friends would want to know all the deets about her deal. They probably wouldn’t ask outright — well, Tessa probably would if the others were salivating hard enough for the 411 — but there’d be some definite hint-dropping and nudging in the effort to get the friends-only scoop. She’d have to play dense-o and fail to pick up on those hints, because this was a rare and clear-cut case where the truth was worse than rumor.

In the end, even her trepidation over the coming lunchtime talk with her friends was worse in the anticipation than in the actual event. There were a couple of feints to ferret out information from Sal and Tessa but the attempts were weaksauce at best, like they were doing it because that’s just what one does when one of your friends is at the center of juicy gossip. As for Jo, Emmy, and Claire, they seemed ready to move on to something else.

Moira could feel her shoulders start to relax as the lunch conversation with her friends swirled on to other targets and other bits of gossip. Maybe her friends didn’t care about the whole ‘Chis is a male ’ho’ deal, or maybe her friends made a pact to not bug her about it. Either way, she could’ve kissed all five of them.

Just as they were finishing lunch and making their move to go outside and enjoy some fresh air before they were called back into class, the group spotted Missy Ellington approaching their table.

“Well, that’s bad news,” Jo remarked.

“What do you want to bet she’s coming over here to talk more crap about…” Sal’s voice trailed off as she caught sight of Moira’s face. 

“Let’s just ignore her and go,” Emmy said. She grinned at Moira, “Girlfriend, you don’t need her yanking your chain, am I right?”

“I heard that,” Moira agreed as she got to her feet. Thank God for real friends.

“Yo, Murphy,” Missy called out as she approached the table.

“Ignore her, ignore her, ignore her,” Tessa sing-songed quietly next to her as Claire silently positioned herself between Moira and the approaching Missy.

“Yo, Murphy,” Missy repeated again as she came to a stop. Since she was a full head taller than Claire she could clearly see Moira, despite the voluntary human shield. “My mother needs to know if you’re going to come to my grand-ma’s birthday party or not.”

That was so far away from the expected, that Moira could only ask, “Hunh?”

“Yeah, Ma didn’t get your RSVP.” Missy sounded like she was repeating something by rote, like her stupid brain was trying to remember her lines. “So I gotta let her know if she’s gonna pick you up or not.”

Moira and her friends exchanged confused glances. Considering that Missy and her clique hated the bunch of them, this had to be some kind of set-up for a humiliation.

Missy stood there staring into space like the stupid cow she was.

Moira slapped her forehead. “D’oh. I’m so stupid.”

“What? You’re not actually supposed to _go_, are you?” Jo asked.

“No. It’s just that I can’t,” Moira said with relief. “I’m, unh, grounded.” She turned a sticky-sweet smile on Missy. “So, see? I can’t go, that’s even if there really is a birthday party for your grandmother.”

Missy didn’t even answer. She just continued staring into space. It was kind of freaky to see.

“And what is _up _with this?” Tessa asked as she snapped her fingers in front of Missy’s face.

No reaction.

“Think she’s hypnotized? I bet she’s hypnotized,” Sal said.

Claire sighed the long-suffering sigh of the smart member of their group. “You can’t hypnotize someone to do something they wouldn’t do if they were fully awake. It doesn’t work like that.”

“So what do _you_ think is wrong, o Brainiac?” Emmy asked as she crowded in to get a closer look at Zombie Missy.

“Maybe she’s on drugs?” Sal asked.

“Look at you. Hypnotism, now drugs,” Jo snarked. “Maybe she’s just playing us.”

“Occam’s Razor.” Claire nodded.

“Oakum’s wha?” Tessa asked.

Claire sighed her brainy sigh again. “The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Jo’s probably right.”

“Nice try, Missy,” Moira sing-songed as she made the international sign of toodle-doo with her fingers. “Had me going there for a second, but—”

Moira’s cell phone trilled with the ring she assigned to Mom. It was obviously Chris-related news, but she sure as heck wasn’t going to talk to Mom in front of Missy, even if Missy couldn’t hear Mom’s half of the conversation.

“Let’s go,” Moira said as she pulled her cell out of her pocket.

As she and her friends turned away from Missy in unison, Moira hit the talk button. “Hey Mom,” Moira answered with as normal a voice as she could manage.

“Ummmm, honey?” Mom sounded nervous. “Did Missy Ellington just invite you to a birthday party for her grandmother?”

Moira stopped cold and looked over her shoulder.

Missy was still standing in the same spot. She also still had that freaky stare, except this time she was staring at nothing.

“Honey? Moira?” Mom’s voice rose in a panicked volume.

“How did you know about Missy?” Moira asked.

There was a long pause. “So it is true.”

“Mom? What’s going on?” Moira asked.

“I need you to tell her that you’ll go,” Mom said in a rush.

“Wait. What? _Why_? We don’t even like each other,” Moira said.

Her friends exchanged confused glances before they turned their stares on her.

“Just do it. I’ll explain later,” Mom said.

“But—” Moira said.

“Just go with Mrs. Ellington after school, stay at the party, and when Mrs. Ellington offers to give you a ride home after dinner, just take it. Whatever you do, stay with them. Don’t try to leave earlier, and don’t leave on your own,” Mom said.

What Moira wanted to ask was, _Oh, God. Did things go that badly with the FBI? Or with Chris? How deep is the suck going to get today?_

But she didn’t dare say any of that, not while her friends were watching and listening.

“Moira?” Mom prompted.

“I’m here.” Moira’s brain scrambled to come up with a much shorter and more neutral version of what she really wanted to say. “Ummmm, can I ask why? I mean, what’s going on? Is it bad news?”

“I’m not entirely sure.” Mom sounded really nervous now. “I don’t think we’re in any immediate danger, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Moira couldn’t take it. “Is it—” she began.

“Chris?” Mom finished for her. “No. This is about something related. I think. I…I really don’t know how to explain this at all.”

“Could you try?” Moira desperately asked.

“Honey, please. Just trust me. I _will_ explain when you get home.” Mom paused again before adding, “I’m not sure how I’ll explain, but I will. _Please_, Moira. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t important.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll tell Missy that I’m coming,” Moira said.

“Good girl. I’ll talk to you as soon as you get home,” Mom said before she cut the connection.

“What was that about?” Tessa asked.

Moira blinked at her. “That was Mom telling me that I have to go to Missy’s stupid party, whether I want to or not.”

“Seriously?” Emmy asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, I don’t get it either,” Moira said as she turned back to Missy.

She was more than freaked to notice that Missy hadn’t moved a muscle or stopped staring into space since she and her friends had walked away.


	3. Hanging invisible over the summer night...

 

Prior to getting into Mrs. Ellington’s car after school, Moira had been pretty sure that she had scaled the heights of Mount Bizarre and that it just wasn’t humanly possible for things to get any stranger.

She was quickly disabused of that notion.

When she got in the Ellingtons’ minivan, both Missy and Mrs. Ellington politely welcomed her and asked if she was comfortable, and asked if she had a good day, and checked to make sure she had her seat belt on, and asked if she was ready for the party. The words all sounded like the kind of thing anyone would say to someone who was Missy’s designed bestest buddy ever, which Moira most certainly _wasn’t_.

But that wasn’t the weirdest part about the polite chit-chat.

It was the way they said it, almost robotically as if they were repeating a series of phrases that they had been programmed to say. The robotic nature of the conversation was further enhanced by the somewhat glassy, blank stares on their faces whenever they looked at her.

Niceties complete, Mrs. Ellington set off. It seemed to Moira that neither Missy nor Mrs. Ellington even noticed her presence in the backseat. It was during these times of invisibility that Missy and Mrs. Ellington seemed to act and talk in a completely normal fashion. However, whenever they were forced to acknowledge Moira’s existence, something that happened a couple of times during the ride, an expression of faint surprise crossed their faces as if they seemed to suddenly remember she was there before they responded in a stilted parody of a conversation.

As soon as the latest verbal exchange was complete, both Missy and her mother seemed to forget that Moira was even there as they returned back to normal.

The birthday party for Missy’s grandmother was more of the same, times 17 more people, spread out over several hours instead of 35 minutes, and involved an actual sit-down meal.

By the time the birthday cake came out and Missy’s grandmother blew out the candles, Moira was so freaked by the whole thing that she retreated to a corner and willed herself into invisibility.

It helped only somewhat, since every once in a while someone in Missy’s extended family would suddenly notice her presence. Cue the faint surprise, the descent into being a robot, and the stilted conversation. As soon as the painful exchange was complete the other person would wander away, seemingly forgetting that they had spoken to her only seconds before.

By the time 8 p.m. rolled around and Mrs. Ellington hollowly asked Moira if she was ready to go, Moira was ready to bolt out the door and take her chances on finding her own way home, even if it meant walking across the entire length and breadth of the city in the dark.

The car ride with just herself and Mrs. Ellington was even more goosepimply. 

After Moira told Mrs. Ellington where she lived, the two of the fell into a strained silence. Moira was at first grateful to be spared the trial of a conversation where the other person wasn’t quite present and accounted for; until she realized that Mrs. Ellington had gone from “robot” to “puppet.” Mrs. Ellington’s glassy-eyed stare was fixed on the road ahead, and her hands seemed to jerkily move as she turned the steering wheel or hit the directional.

By the time they reached home, Moira was so anxious to get away that she flung open the passenger door just as the minivan rolled to a stop in front of her house. She grabbed her book bag, jumped out onto the sidewalk, and ran up the front walk without bothering to look back. She was just about to put her key into the lock when the front door jerked open.

Mom didn’t say a word. She just grabbed Moira up into a tight hug.

Suddenly, Mom let her go.

“Jean,” Mom said.

Moira turned around and let out a small, startled scream.

Mrs. Ellington was standing _right behind her_. Worse, she still had that far-away, glassy stare.

Mom put a hand on Moira’s shoulder. “Jean?” she repeated, sounding far less sure of herself.

“Moira and Missy had a wonderful time building a flamethrower in the garage,” Mrs. Ellington said.

Moira was shocked. “Wait. _What_?”

Mom’s hand squeezed her shoulder. “Shush, honey.”

“I don’t even know what she’s—” Moira began.

“_Shush_. Later,” Mom ordered.

“We plan to use it at our barbeque tomorrow,” Mrs. Ellington said in an emotionless voice. “We’re going to use it on my mother-in-law.”

Moira’s mouth dropped open. _What was going on?_

“That’s wonderful!” Mom chirpily said in a strained voice. “Good night!”

Without a word, Mrs. Ellington turned away and jerkily walked back to her minivan.

“Mom! There was no flamethrower!” Moira protested. “I wouldn’t even know how to build—”

“I know,” Mom cut her off as she dragged Moira into the house.

“She’s _lying_,” Moira protested.

Mom slammed the door shut, turned around, and leaned against it. “I know.”

Moira was outraged. “You _know_, then why didn’t you _say _something. Isn’t it in the Mom contract to defend your kids against something like that when you know it’s a lie? _Especially_ when it’s a lie!”

“She’s not going to remember you were there anyway,” Mom said.

Moira had the overwhelming urge to stamp her foot out of sheer frustration. None of this is making any sense. “What are you _talking_ about?”

“The only way to explain is to show you.” Mom held out her hand.

As Moira stared at her mother, it suddenly struck her that Mom looked terrified. “Okay,” she cautiously said as she took her mother’s outstretched hand. It was then that she realized that Mom was shaking.

When they entered the living room, a red-headed woman in loose-fitting, flowing, hippie-like clothes stood up from the couch. “You must be Moira,” she said.

Moira could only openly stare. Here she was, the redhead she saw hugging Chris a million years ago, standing close enough to touch.

“Moira, this is…this is…” Mom’s voice faded and she shivered.

The redhead’s smile was a little too bright. “I’m Willow. I’m a very old friend of your stepfather’s,” she chirped.

Moira swallowed. The redhead wasn’t fooling her for a second. Now that she could see the woman — Willow — up close, something wasn’t adding up. Yeah, she looked like someone who was soft and squishy, but there was something about her that telegraphed a don’t-mess-with-me vibe.

It took everything that Moira had not to run screaming from the house.

“She’s…she’s…well, she’s explained a lot,” Mom said in a shaky voice. “About Chris, and about what happened before we met him, and why everything is falling apart.”

Willow’s eyes narrowed very slightly, even though her too-bright smile didn’t dim one jot. “And was able to prove I was telling the truth, I hope.”

“Yes,” Mom said.

“Good.” Willow’s smile disappeared and her expression became business-like. “So I can count on you packing your bags and leaving town?”

“We’ll do it tonight,” Mom promised.

“We’re leaving?” Moira asked.

“Yes,” Mom said. She hesitantly looked back at Willow. “It turns out that Chris isn’t paranoid and he hasn’t gone crazy.”

“Glad I convinced you,” Willow said.

Now Moira began to shake. “All that stuff about monsters and darkness is true? Really?”

“I’m afraid so,” Willow said.

Moira wasn’t entirely sold on the idea that monsters were real or that day was going to turn into pitch black night, but when she looked up at her mother for some sign about the truth she saw from Mom’s expression that whatever was really going on was either just as bad or worse.

“We’re just going to pack enough to last us a few days and we’ll get going to…” Mom cleared her throat. “Is Philadelphia far enough?”

“Only if we manage to keep a lid on things here,” Willow said.

“Philadelphia it is,” Mom said.

“Just one thing. Don’t leave while it’s still dark out. Wait until dawn,” Willow warned. “There are things in the dark just waiting for you guys to make a run for it. We’re all scrambling to prepare, so we don’t have the people to escort you out of state.”

“Dawn,” Mom repeated. “We’ll be safe at dawn?”

“You should be,” Willow said as she picked up her coat from the arm of the couch. “But I’d get all the packing done tonight so you can leave as soon as the sun starts its pink-time peek over the horizon.”

As Willow put on her coat, Mom cleared her throat.

Willow actually smiled as she refocused her attention on them. “Another question?”

“If you could do what you did to the Ellingtons, why didn’t you just do the same thing to us?” Mom asked. “Why not do it to everyone in the city if we’re all in so much danger?”

Willow’s smile became dazzling, although it could be because this time it seemed genuine. “I can see why he fell for you.”

Mom and Moira exchanged glances.

“Ummm, thanks?” Mom hazarded.

Willow suddenly looked away, as if she was silently wishing that she could just snap her fingers and get everyone who was in danger out of danger. “It’s not that easy. There’s too many people for us to bespell them into running. We could pull it off with _maybe_ a couple of hundred people, and it would take all our resources to do that much.” Willow looked up at them. “Then there’s the whole time-plus-distance problem. We could get you and all those other people into their cars, and get all of you to start driving out of town, but within hours you’d be wondering where you were going and why and you’d all just turn around and come back home.”

“Oh.” Mom’s voice sounded very small, as if the explanation made perfect sense to her.

Well, it didn’t to Moira. “Then if there’s some kind of danger coming, why not just _tell_ people that it’s coming?” she asked.

Willow’s smile seemed kind of sad. “_You_ don’t even believe me, and it took hours, a show-and-tell, _and_ some serious rabbits-out-of-hats action to convince your mother that I was telling the truth. What makes you think random people are going to believe me if I just walk up to them on the street and start shouting at them about demons preparing to go all rampage-y?”

“But—” Moira began.

“Just trust her,” Mom cut in. “There’s no way you can believe it unless you’ve seen it for yourself.”

Moira sharply looked up at her mother.

“I can show myself out,” Willow said. “Just get out of here as soon as you can, and you’ll be fine.”

“Wait!” Mom dated forward, as if she expected Willow to simply wink out of existence instead of walk to the door. “Chris! You’ll take care of Chris, right? You’ll keep him safe?”

Willow looked away again. “I’ll try. He put the hurt on them back in the day, and they’re not the most forgiving creatures in the universe. They’re specifically gunning for him. Someone will be in contact with you one way or the other when this is over. That’s the best I can do.”

Mom’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“I wish I could do better.” Willow said. “It was nice meeting you. Both of you.”

And just like that, Willow was _gone._

Moira jumped out of surprise before backing up a few steps. “What happened? Where did she go?”

“Away.” Mom spun around. “Time to pack. And honey, pack only the bare minimum. All you get is whatever can fit in your book bag and that’s it. We need to look like we’re following our normal routine just in case anyone’s watching us.”

“Leaving at dawn is the normal routine? And _who_ will be watching us?” Moira demanded. “Mom, you’re scaring me.”

Mom hugged herself. “Good. Well, not good, but I need you to know just how serious this. As for the rest of it,” here she paused and fixed her gaze on Moira, “everything Chris told you is true.”

Moira shook her head as she backed up a few more steps. This couldn’t be happening. It just _couldn’t_ be happening. Mom had caught whatever infected Chris. “What? Monsters? Darkness? You’re telling me that’s _real_?”

“Real enough,” Mom said as she marched for the stairs.

“You’re telling me that it’s all _true_? Even the fact that Chris copped to murdering someone?” Moira demanded.

Mom paused on the first step. “Oh. Oh, no. That was a lie. Chris didn’t murder anyone.”

“But he said—” Moira began.

“He told you that because he wanted to be sure that you’d tell me everything about your conversation,” Mom interrupted. “Apparently you promised to hide the fact that you and he went for a Del’s.”

Moira hunched her shoulders. As crazy as her life was getting, and as much as all signs were pointing to it getting even crazier, she didn’t feel like the hammer had come down until Mom let her know that she’d been busted but good.

“He told you he murdered someone to scare you into talking to me,” Mom unnecessarily added.

Moira shook her head. Things were making less and less sense. “If he didn’t murder this Alexander guy, then why would calling the FBI and mentioning that name get Chris into trouble?”

“Oh honey, Alexander Harris isn’t dead,” Mom said. “That’s Chris’s real name.”

*********

She’s still staring at the brown stain on the wall above her bed when she hears the bathroom door close again. She keeps it there even after she sees Faith sit back down on the other bed out of the corner of her eye.

“Nice,” Faith says in a flat voice. “He saved your ass, and you look at him like he’s dog shit.”

He saved her? Really? Because that’s not the way she sees it at all.

“You realize that he just bought you a first class ticket out of this dimension when it all falls to shit, right?” Faith asks.

She screws up her face as she glances at Faith.

“Oh, yeah. World’s coming to an end for sure.” Faith nods. “Maybe not tomorrow, or next week, but it’s about to go up in fire and brimstone. You can make book on that. Too bad no one’ll get a chance to collect.”

This time when she looks at Faith, her disbelieving gaze stays there.

Faith looks like she’s licking her chops over the prospect that the world is about to go boom.

She shivers.

“What happened to your hometown? That was just a _taste_, get me? A _taste_. A test-run to see if their little set-up worked,” Faith says. “As it stands right now, half of Newport’s still on fire, the other half is dead. And we actually _won_ that battle.”

“That’s a lie,” she hisses. “My house got attacked, my neighbors got killed, my mother is _dead,_ but that’s because of _him_. There’s no way the entire city got nuked.”

“Wish it was a lie, but it ain’t.” Faith shrugs like she doesn’t care that she’s just been called a liar. “Don’t believe me? We can turn on the crappy TV right there in the corner and you’ll be able to see for yourself. It’s all over the news, 24-7.”

She takes Faith up on her dare. She pushes herself off the bed, pauses just long enough to put what’s left of her sub down on the wrapping paper, and makes her way to a small TV in the corner.

She’s surprised that Faith lets her actually reach her goal. “I’m turning it on,” she announces as she reaches for the on button.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

She pauses and looks over her shoulder. Faith’s butt is not only firmly seated on the bed, but she’s not even looking in her general direction.

Maybe Faith is telling the truth.

The she remembers how fast Faith was able to move when she saw _him_ stumble out of the bathroom. It’s just as likely that Faith is playing with her and at the last minute will move at the speed of light to stop her from turning on the TV.

She hears the shower start in the bathroom

It’s like a signal.

She reaches for the on button.

*********

First there was the rush of packing and installing Mom’s gym bag and Moira’s backpack next to the door.

This was followed by Moira finally pitching a fit and insisting that Mom tell her everything, the whole truth and nothing but.

Mom seemed to sense that Moira had reached the end of her rope and wasn’t going to budge one inch more. She miraculously gave in to Moira’s demands.

What followed was a very long conversation — interspersed with a million questions, and not a little screaming and crying — that lasted until the wee hours of the morning where Moira got exactly what she demanded.

Even after collapsing into bed, Moira mind was racing so much that she couldn’t fall asleep.

_It isn’t real. It can’t be real, _she mentally insisted.

And yet, Mom had verbally insisted that it was.

The last thing she remembered as she tossed and turned was looking at the clock and seeing that it read 3:15 a.m.

Next thing she knew, she was being shaken awake.

“Honey! Get up! Get up now!”

Moira jerked away and sleepily insisted, “G’way. Tired.”

“Moira! We have to go now! Get dressed!”

Moira slit open an eye. The bright sunlight was streaming through her bedroom window.

She jerked upright. “I’m late for school!”

“Late yes, but not for school,” Mom said as she dragged Moira out of bed.

_Oh. Yeah. The monsters are due in Washington Square_.

The sleepy thought jolted Moira awake. “The monsters! We overslept! By a lot!”

“That’s right. Get dressed,” Mom ordered as she bolted for the bedroom door, ripping off her housecoat as she went.

Moira stripped out of her pajamas and yanked on the clothes she set out the night before. _Oh God, oh God, oh God…_

She bolted for the bathroom to pee, brush her teeth, and splash water on her face. Then she raced down the stairs for the front door. “Mom! Hurry!” she yelled.

“In a sec!” Mom yelled back. “Wait by the bags! Don’t go outside without me!”

As Moira reached the front door, the doorbell rang. She froze and wondered what she should do.

The sun was still out, and that Willow person said they’d be pretty safe if it was daylight.

Moira stole over to the window next to the front door and peeked out.

It was Chris.

She threw the door open with a happy cry, and flung her arms around his waist before he could even get a word out of his mouth.

“Why are you still here?” Chris demanded as he hugged her back. “You both should be long gone by now.”

“We overslept,” Mom breathlessly said.

Moira looked over her shoulder to see Mom come barreling down the stairs with her coat in her arms.

Chris released Moira and caught Mom up in a hug. “Thank God. I was afraid you’d both been attacked.”

Mom pulled back. “But your friend said we’d be okay if we stayed inside until the sun was out.”

“Yeah, but not for much longer,” Chris said as he scooped up the bags.

“It’s happening today?” Mom asked.

Chris looked down at Moira before looking back at Mom. He looked like he was ready to cry. “Yeah. It’s starting soon.”

Mom grabbed Moira by the wrist. “We’re leaving now.”

“Hope now’s soon enough,” Chris said as he turned on his heel and raced for their car, leaving Moira and her mother to follow.

“Are you coming with us?” Moira asked.

“I wish I could, but I can’t,” Chris said as Mom struggled to get her shaking hand to insert the key into the trunk’s lock.

“Why not?” Moira asked. “Why do you have to stay?”

“She’s right,” Mom said as the trunk popped open. “That isn’t your life any more. It hasn’t been your life for years. Let your friends handle it and come with us.”

Chris placed their bags in the trunk, and slammed it shut.  Then he leaned forward, holding himself up with his hands splayed on the surface of the trunk’s hood.

For a moment, Moira was sure he was going to agree and jump in the car with them.

Chris suddenly stood and looked at them, his mind made up. “I can’t. I’m partially at fault for them getting away 12 years ago. Plus, they’re here because I’m here, which makes me completely responsible for whatever happens next. I can’t just walk away.”

Mom grabbed Chris by the arm. “Change your mind,” she begged.

“Please,” Moira added.

Chris just shook his head and drew them both in a hug. “Go be safe,” he whispered. “I’ll find you as soon as this is over.”

“I just want you to know that when this is over I want you to come back.” Mom’s voice was muffled.

Chris let them both go with a frown. “It might not be that easy. I have a bad feeling that now that the Council knows I’m alive, they’re going to reinstate me on the payroll whether I want to or not.”

“Couldn’t you just hide again?” Moira asked. “You could take us with you.”

“As someone who did that for almost three years, trust me when I tell you that it’s not much of life,” Chris said. “Actually, living on the Council’s dime isn’t much of a life either. If you guys stick with me, you’re looking at really crappy choices either way.”

“We’ll work it out. Whatever happens, we’ll work it out,” Mom said. “Besides, I’d like to get to know the real you.”

Chris actually smiled. “You always had the real me. You just didn’t have my real name.”

Mom was smiling, too. “Well, now I do.”

Chris looked up and his smile disappeared. “_Fuck._”

Mom was immediately on alert. “What is it?” she asked.

Moira spun around.

_The sky._

As soon as she noticed the gathering clouds, the light began to leech away and the landscape fade into a dark, crawling mist that seemed to seep out of the ground.

“Get into the house!” Chris shouted.

Mom grabbed Moira by the hand and bolted for the front door. The only reason why Moira dragged along behind her was because Mom had longer legs and could run faster.

“Hurry, hurry,” Chris said behind them as Mom struggled to unlock the front door.

The world looked like it had been plunged into nighttime within a matter of seconds, and it was getting even darker.

The front door swung open, and Moira felt a shove from behind that propelled her over the threshold into the house.

“Chris,” Mom began.

“Get inside. I’ll be fine.” Chris glanced once more at the darkening sky before looking back at them. “And remember, lock everything down, pull the shades, and _don’t let anyone in _until you see sunlight. Understand?”

“And use only the white candles in your desk for light, and if something gets into the house go upstairs to our bedroom closet and close the door behind us,” Mom answered. “Yes, I remember.”

Chris grabbed Mom by the head and kissed her forehead. “I love you both. Be careful.”

“You, too,” Mom said.

Before Moira could wish Chris luck, he turned, ran off the front porch, and disappeared into the darkness.

*********

On her mother’s orders, Moira ran up to the second floor. By the time she reached the top of the stairs the power had gone out and the pitch black had seeped into the house and left her blind. She held her hand up to her face and let out a small scream when she realized she couldn’t even see it.

“Moira!” Mom shouted from the first floor.

“I’m fine…I just…I can’t see anything,” Moira shouted back.

“Shut the shades and get into the closet!” Mom yelled up at her.

That’s when the deafening noise began. It _almost_ sounded like a fierce windstorm mixed with the sound of an onrushing train, but there was another sound underneath that sounded like high-pitched and babbling nonsense.

Moira tightly shut her eyes, and willed herself to do as Mom asked, even as her head began to pound from the noise. She held her hands out in front of her body so she’d be able to feel walls or pieces of furniture before she crashed into it with her awkwardly shuffling body, and edged forward. Her method really didn’t help all that much. It seemed that no matter what she tried — whether it was moving her outstretched hands around or slowing the gait of her shuffle — she was constantly running into walls, tripping over door jams, and smacking against the sharp corners of the furniture. Her shins came in for further abuse as they came into unexpected, painful contact with hidden corners and sharp edges.

She was pretty sure that there was _no way_ the house was this cluttered before everything went dark.

Yet as blind and stumbling as she was, she was able to spot every uncovered window in every area she traveled because each one looked like a floating black square that was only slightly darker than the area around it. The strange sight sent a chill up her spine whenever she saw it. The only way to get rid of those dark squares, along with the unease they caused, was to fumble around until she found the shade and pulled it down.

As the windows slowly but steadily disappeared from sight behind the drawn shades, something in her chest began to loosen. Were it not for the increasing volume of the roaring with its high-pitched babbling undercurrent that seemed to put increasing pressure on her temples, she’d almost call that loosening in her chest a feeling of relief.

Despite her halting, stumbling progress, she managed to shut the shades for the windows at the end of the hall, the bathroom, her bedroom, and the guest bedroom. As she fumbled her way to the door of Mom’s and Chris’s room, she was grateful that she was unable to see anything in the blackness outside, not that she was all that eager to see anything that might be capable of contributing the cacophony she was hearing.

_Heck, a monster could be standing right in front of me and I wouldn’t know it was there unless I tripped over it._

The thought forced her to a halt and resulted in a small panic attack as she gulped down sobbing breaths. Her ears ached and her head pounded from trying to hear any sound that might be out of place over the deafening incessant noise. Her muscles tensed like wires as she spun in place and flailed her arms on the off-chance that she might hit and hurt anything that might be in the hallway with her.

“Moira!” Mom shouted up to her from somewhere on the first floor.

Moira stopped flailing as she mentally grabbed the sound of Mom’s voice like it was a lifeline. “I’m fine! I’m good! It’s j-j-j-ust a little slow going!” she shouted back.

“Why aren’t you in the closet?” Mom demanded.

“I-I-I still have your bedroom to go!” Moira shouted back.

“Hurry!” Mom yelled. This was followed by a loud crash.

“Mom!” Moira screamed.

“I’m okay! I tripped!” Mom shouted back. “Keep going! I’ll be up there in a little bit!”

Moira took a deep breath and let it out. Strangely enough, Mom’s assurances that she was okay gave her a little boost of courage.

Moira took that final step into Mom’s bedroom to pull the shades over the last two uncovered windows on the second floor.

Blocking out the first window to her immediate right was a piece of cake, relatively speaking. There was nothing in her way, so she didn’t stumble into anything. Now it was only a matter of turning around, circumnavigating the bed and the cedar chest at its foot, and then getting to the window on the opposite side of the room.

The whole process was about as arduous as she expected, complete with running into the bed — which didn’t hurt — and slamming into a corner of the cedar chest with her right shin — which did. Still, she managed to reach the dark floating square signifying the presence of the window with relatively little trauma, all things considered.

With a sigh of relief, she reached out to feel for the shade.

A blood red distorted face with yellow eyes, a gaping mouth, a lolling pink tongue, and teeth as long as her hand popped into existence on the other side of the glass from seemingly nowhere. Moira let out a blood-curdling scream as the face pressed itself against the glass as if it were trying to get a better look at her.

_Let me iiiiiiinnnnnn. Let me iiiiinnnnnn,_ something sing-songed in Moira’s head.

She screamed again, even as she drew closer to the window.

Two clawed hands appeared on either side of the face and began to push against the glass.

_Little giiiiirrrllll, do you like kisses and sweeeeetsssss? Let me iiiiinnnnn and all will be sweeeeet and sssssaaaaafe, _the voice in Moira’s head sang.

Moira’s mouth remained open even as the screaming died in her throat. She reached for the window to open it up and let in the singer.

The thing on the other side of the window rubbed its face back and forth against the glass and sung of the beautiful place it would take her and all the wonderful things they’d do together once she let it in.

Moira yanked the window upward, but it remained stubbornly closed despite her best effort. It must be locked, then. She would have to unlock it.

“Moira!” Mom screamed from behind her.

Moira snapped out of her trance.

The face on the other side of the windowpane twisted into a hateful snarl as it uselessly beat its fists against the glass.

Moira screamed again as she threw herself backwards to get away from the awful sight.

Something brushed by her, prompting another loud scream out of her as she landed butt-first on the bed. As her upper body fell backwards on to the mattress, she saw the shadow of an arm obscure part of that horrible monster-face and begin pulling down the shade.

Moira curled into the fetal position and began to sob uncontrollably into the comforter.

A soft touch on her shoulder caused her to scream again, and try to scramble away.

“Honey! It’s me! It’s me!” Mom shouted.

Moira’s sobbing picked up in intensity and volume as she felt her mother’s arms gather her up in a hug.

“Shhhhhh, it’s okay. We’re safe now. It’s okay.” Mom sounded like she was crying, too. “We’re going to be fine. We’ve shut them out. We’re safe now. We’re okay. We’re going to be okay.”

*********

Even after Faith shuts off the television, she stares in disbelief at the blank screen.

She still wants to call it all a lie, despite the horrible news reports on multiple channels showing the burning ruin that used to be home.

Now it’s not anything. Now it’s just some place where something horrible happened and a whole lot of people got killed and a whole lot of people are dying.

People she knew.

People she knew yesterday.

At least it’s not a hole in the ground, right? As long as something was still standing, people could rebuild and start over, right?

Right?

“The shit thing about this is that we _won_,” Faith repeats. This time she sounds angry.

“Won,” she stupidly repeats as she finally tears her eyes away from the empty screen and looks up at Faith.

Faith holds out a hand. “I think staying on the floor is a fast ticket to getting some nasty disease. Let’s at least get you to a chair. Or back to bed.”

She ignores Faith’s hand as she gets to her feet and stumbles toward her bed. “This is _his_ fault, isn’t it?”

“Not gonna lie, Newport got targeted ’cause they found out he lived there.” Faith’s voice sounds like she’s following from close behind. “As for whose fault it is that it got to this point? It’s everyone’s, which is basically the same as saying that it’s no one’s. Sucks, but when you’ve got everyone fucking up from beginning to end that’s what you’re left with.”

“Still sounds like his fault that Newport got attacked,” she mumbles as she collapses on the bed.

She feels numb. She can’t even feel angry like she should. Or upset, or sad, or anything. She doesn’t even have the urge to scream or cry or throw things. She feels all hollowed-out, like there’s nothing inside. It’s like someone yanked her brain, heart, and stomach out of her body while she wasn’t paying attention.

That can’t be good. It’s definitely not normal.

Faith settles back down on the other bed. “Yeah, they were going for a two-fer when they decided to hit Newport. They figured they could run their little test, and kill his ass dead while they were at it. Too bad for them we found out and got there first.”

“So that’s winning.” She stares down at the disgusting carpet, but doesn’t really see it. “He gets saved, and the heck with everyone else.”

She hears Faith sigh.

“No. Winning is we stopped it from spreading outside the city limits,” Faith says. “Once they set up their mystical nuclear bomb, Newport was as good as gone.”

She stares at Faith utterly lost. She can’t begin to make sense of this.

“But now that they know they can do it? The war’s over.” Faith picks at the bread of her sub. “Now we’re just fighting rearguard action to buy time and save whoever we can before the world goes up in a puff of demons and smoke.”

“That’s not true,” she says. “I _know_ that’s a lie. That man, the one who said we had to go to London, _he_ said that—”

Faith snorts. “I swear to Christ that Angel lives on hope and moonbeams.”

“But he _said_—”

“I can guess what he said. He said that we were all facing a big, tough war, the biggest and the toughest of all. He said that if we were going to ride off into Happy Sunset Land where unicorns shit rainbows, kittens, and puppies we needed all hands on deck, _especially_ the guy who saw this all coming way back in the beginning.” Faith snorts again.

She realizes that Faith looks bitterly amused, like she’s listening to a really sick joke that she doesn’t like hearing.

“Fact is, me and Daddy-o,” here Faith jerks her head toward the bathroom door, “live in what we call the reality-based world. They can fire up their doomsday machine anywhere at any time. And every time they do, every time they _think_ about doing it, we have to find out and get all our people in the right place at the right time before they pull the trigger. And, like I said, even then we gotta kiss that town good-bye. All we’re doing is making sure the shit don’t spread too far outside the city limits.”

She’s clutching the edge of the bed as she openly stares at Faith. If she hadn’t seen that face outside the window, if she hadn’t seen the blood splashed all over her house, it she hadn’t seen the body parts littering her front yard,  if she hadn’t seen the news reports, she could convince herself that it couldn’t possibly be real.

But she did see all of that, and that right there is the problem.

“The thing is they can keep trying over and over again, and we have to keep catching them over and over again,” Faith continues. “They only have to get lucky _once_. We only have to guess wrong _once_. Then it’s over.”

“So find them,” she says through numb lips.

Faith looks at her a long time before she says, “Kid? Why the fuck do you think we’re dragging Harris’s officially dead ass back to London? He’s the best shot we got at finding them, and his information is 12 years out of date.”

She knows that a lot of things could change in 12 years. The heck with that. Everything could change in a single _day_.

Faith picks up her abandoned sub and begins unwrapping it. “Glad you finally get just how screwed we all are,” she says. “But no worries. Daddy-o fixed it so that whatever happens, you’ll survive all nice and safe. Odds are that it won’t be in this dimension, let alone good ol’ planet earth, but beggars can’t be choosers. Am I right?”

*********

Moira absolutely, positively wouldn’t go into the closet.

Despite Chris’s assurances that nothing could get through the closet door once it was closed, the thought that Chris could be wrong got stuck in Moira’s head and refused to leave. She didn’t care how safe it supposedly was, and she didn’t care that it supposedly could keep the monsters out. It was too dark in there, too small, and a dead-end trap if Chris turned out to be wrong.

She only felt reasonably calm when one of Chris’s special white candles was lit and she was inside the bright circle of its flickering light.

Mom had brought several up with her, one of which had been lit when she first entered the room, and a lighter. She had dropped the lit candle and its unlit clones when she saw the monster-face in the window. Thankfully the flame on the candle extinguished when it hit the floor, otherwise they’d have been forced to choose between burning to death and running out into the monster-filled darkness.

Moira knew that she’d probably take her chances with an out-of-control fire rather than face anything that might be lurking outside in the dark.

Mom didn’t put up much argument when Moira pleaded to stay outside with the candle. Mom even went so far as to admit that she actually agreed with Moira’s worries, especially since the closet was just about big enough to hold the two of them with very little legroom left over.

As they stared into the open door of the closet with candle held out before them, they both agreed that _if_ they could bring a lit candle with them inside they’d probably feel more comfortable with the idea. However, the closet was too full of flammable things, ranging from hanging clothes, to shoes, to boxes on the shelves. They debated emptying the closet, but realized that keeping a candle lit while inside was still out of the question since there was always a risk that the cedar walls could catch fire if they were careless or managed to fall asleep and kick over the candle.

Besides, they had proof that the monsters couldn’t enter the house unless they were invited in, and now that all of the shades were drawn the likelihood of another incident was nonexistent. Furthermore, the deafening sound from the outside was now muffled enough that they could at least hear each other talk over the noise. It was still loud, but not loud enough to drown out even rational thought.

In the end, they both agreed.  Shutting themselves up in the closet seemed just a little bit beyond what they could handle, especially when they could keep their candlelight if they stayed out.

Moira let out a relieved breath when Mom suggested a better idea: a camp-out in the middle of living room. At least if they were down there were there instead of in the closet, they’d be able to see any hint of sunlight right away and know that the whole ordeal was over.

_You mean if the sun comes back,_ Moira thought, remembering what Chris told her.

She forced herself to shake off the traitorous idea as she grabbed the blankets and pillows off all of the beds and tossed them down the stairs while Mom followed her with the candle from room to room.

The sun would come back. Of course it would.

Chris and his mysterious friends, whoever and whatever they were, would win the day.

If she believed it was true, it would become true.

As they set up their nest of blankets and pillows in the middle of the living room, Moira happened to glance up and spy the dim outline of the fireplace just at the edge of the flickering light cast by the candle in its holder on the coffee table. She whimpered and shook as she backed up several steps.

Mom was by her side like a shot. “What is it?” she sharply asked. “Did you see something?”

“Can they come down the chimney?” Moira asked.

Mom let out a relieved breath as she put her arm around Moira’s shoulders. “No. I closed the flue first thing.”

“Maybe we should light a fire for little extra protection, just in case,” Moira said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” Moira desperately asked.

“I tried it. I couldn’t get the tinder to catch,” Mom said.

Moira looked up into Mom’s face.

Mom looked down at Moira, her face drawn tight with worry. “I couldn’t light the tinder, and the wicks on the regular candles wouldn’t light either. The only thing that would even light was the white candles I got from Chris’s desk.”

Moira’s eyes were drawn to the lit candle. “Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know what Chris actually is?” Moira asked.

“I think you mean ‘who’, honey,” Mom said. “And I told you. His real name is—”

“No. I mean _what_,” Moira insisted. “He built a closet that can supposedly keep people safe from monster attacks if they get inside and close the door, _and_ he’s got the only candles in the whole house that you can actually light. It’s like…it’s like…he’s some kind of secret wizard.”

Mom’s tight grip around her shoulders got tighter. “When you put it like that…” her voice trailed off. She cleared her throat. “Let’s hope that if he’s a wizard, he’s more Harry Potter than Servus Snape_._”

“I’m hoping for something more like Gandalf,” Moira quickly said. “Gandalf is a lot more powerful.”

Mom actually giggled at that. “You hope for Gandalf, and I’ll hope Harry Dresden.”


End file.
